Vlad has a fix for this - a hacked SB16 driver, IIRC. He sent it to me, I did some testing, seemed to work okay but if I ran setup again it would be deleted, so I had to archive it.
Aha! Here's Vlad's notes on it:
Run setup once (just to select the music device, you select any digital one), then overwrite digi.drv and do *not* run setup again (or if you do you remember to re-overwrite digi.drv). The
digi.drv I gave you is the patched SB16 driver. Also, this workaround is more for what looks like a SB weirdness (not emulated by VDMSound but, funnily enough, emulated by SoundFX). I have yet to find the "justification" (read: documentation) that explains this quirk, and "fixing" it in VDMSound may break other games which is why I made a game-patch instead (easier).
I don't think he's made any progress since writing about it, so I'll attach the patch. Unzip into the Prince directory and overwrite when prompted.
Note that this is pretty much a "beta" patch, and all standard disclaimers apply.
It may be worth noting that the original "Where in Space is Carmen Sandiego?" and Carmen Deluxe CD-ROM both used the same version of SETUP.EXE (according to the plaintext hidden inside PoP2's SETUP.EXE), perhaps they also suffer from a similar problem.
BTW, I'm moving this to the VDMSound forum, where I think it should go. 😀
"I see a little silhouette-o of a man, Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you
do the Fandango!" - Queen
Stiletto